He had gotten past the
He had gotten a new

his sufferings had come upon him. need of light upon that subject. view of the splendor of the divine majesty and the vastness of God's works. He had gotten such a view of God in his eternal wisdom, holiness, and might that it was enough simply "to lie passive in his hand and know no will but his." To ask God "why" had become to his reverent trust impossible.

Thus at the last Job falls penitent and adoring before the divine glory, his bereavement, his leprosy, the contempt of his enemies, the misconstruction of his friends, his bitter doubts, all forgotten in the one overpowering vision which gives back to him his God never more to be doubted or questioned or chided. In the divine wisdom there can be no mistake, in the divine administration no injustice, in the divine love no change. Why should we

ask for a theodicy? In reverent awe we confess,—

"God is great, and we know him not;

Great things doeth he which we cannot comprehend."

Now we see how the book can be a tragedy with a good ending because the intensity of emotion grows through the storms and into the light, and we leave Job at a crisis sublimer than that of death-the crisis when a human soul and God understand each other and embrace.

Looking back now we see that the great purpose of the book is not so much to explain the uses of affliction as to lift the troubled soul above the need of explanation by presenting full orbed the thought of God. And we see with what consummate skill the poet has kept Job and Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar and Elihu successively exhausting the powers of eloquence in describing the wonders of nature and the perfection of God. Each speech is a step in the golden stairway upward. Bildad turns from the debate saying,

"Behold, even the moon hath no brightness,

And the stars are not pure in his sight,

How much less man, that is a worm !

And the son of man, which is a worm!"

Job after a flight of imagination over the vastness of space out to the confines of light and darkness, whispers overawed :

"Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways:

And how small a whisper do we hear of him!

But the thunder of his power who can understand?"

Thus, whoever is speaking, the one central theme advances. All these references to nature are not poetic embellishments merely, but contributions to the main argument, and when at last Job sees God the Creator and Ruler, the reader also seeros to see him in overpowering majesty.

Are we not justified in saying that this little book of Job, which is printed on less than thirty pages of an ordinary Bible, which may be perused at leisure in a couple of hours, yet in its use of natural imagery, in its analysis of the heart, in its passionate utterances of anguish and victory, in its lyric laments, in its sarcasms and invective, in the boldness and comprehensiveness of its handling of profound practical questions to-day in the foreground of Christian thought, and in its magnificent displays of the divine splendor, surpasses every other single work in the whole world of poetic literature?

ARTICLE IV.

FIRST CORINTHIANS XV. 20-28.

BY PROFESSOR A. C. KENDRICK, D.D., LL.D., UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER, ROCHESTER, N. Y.

THE New Testament contains two or three passages which may, perhaps, be termed "monadic" in their character. While most of the Scripture teachings appear in manifold forms and depend for their attestation on no sin. gle passage, in these the truth, as perhaps of less vital practical importance, is left to their single utterance. Such, if I rightly interpret it, is the passage in which Peter declares the personal preaching of the risen Christ to the impenitent victims of the Flood. Such, though not without one or two other probable allusions (as 2 Thess. ii. 3), seems the apocalyptic (symbolical, yet none the less real) revelation of the millennial glory of the church followed by a brief apostasy just preceding the final catastrophe. Eminently such, and more signal perhaps than either, is the passage indicated at the head of this article, which stands alone in revealing one or two remarkable features of that critical point when the scenes of time shall open out on the issues of eternity. These are the abdication by the Son of his temporary universal dominion, and the surrender of his vice-royalty to the hands from which he had received it. This special point is confined strictly to verses 24 and 28; yet, as it is intertwined in the entire passage (ver. 20-28), forming a connected whole, I propose to include in my discussion also the passage in which it lies imbedded. On the abdication, opinion is nearly unanimous; the statements of the apostle seem too explicit to allow much diversity. On the

results of the abdication, I fear that my opinions are not shared by most interpreters. In the rest of the passage the most important question is, whether it teaches a double or triple tagma (order, class) in the resurrection; and thus, whether the end (Tò Téλos) is the last act of the resurrection itself, or, as the language scanned more closely may imply, following this, the closing scene of the great eschatological drama.

But besides this another point. The memorable passage (ver. 20–28) which opens this unique glimpse into the world's closing scene,-the surrender of the Son's delegated sway,—is interposed amidst a glowing strain of reflection on the fact and the necessity of the Christian resurrection (ver. 13-19, 29-33); on the emptiness, apart from this, of the Christian hope, and the wretchedness of the Christian life. The persistent earnestness of this strain shows how deep a hold it has taken on the mind of the apostle; how the sufferings of the infant church are to him matters of the deepest and darkest reality. Follow for a moment his course of thought. The resurrection of the dead, he argues, is the logical condition of the resurrection of Christ (as the resurrection of Christ is the causal condition of the resurrection of the dead). If the dead rise not, Christ is not risen, the apostle's preaching is false, and the disciples' faith is vain. They that have fallen asleep in Christ have perished, and the believer, imperilled in the present, and hopeless of the future, is the most miserable of men. So from verses 12 to 19. After turning away for a moment to the brighter and glorious side, he resumes at verse 29, Since what shall they do who are baptized for the dead,-whose very baptism pledges them to death,-if the dead rise not? Why are they so baptized? Why do alike laity and apostles (2 Cor. vi. 4-10) stand in perpetual jeopardy, live a life of daily dying, contend in deadlier than gladiatorial struggles, and push aside the cup of worldly pleasure which a wiser atheism. commends to their lips?

In this connection the meaning of the vexed phrase "baptized for the dead" would scarcely seem subject to reasonable doubt. If we credit the apostle with any logical coherency of thought, it has but one fitting interpretation, and that suggested as easily by the words themselves as it is by the context. The "baptism for the dead," alike from what precedes and follows, can only be a baptism which puts its subject into constant peril of death, which brings him as it were into companionship with the dead. It is no violent strain that this construction puts upon the words. In the energetic conception and pregnant. language of the apostle, the disciple may easily be conceived as baptized on behalf of, in relation to, the dead; as belonging, henceforth, by pledge and by destiny, rather to the dead than to the living. Surely they may be easily described, as baptized for the dead, whose badge and condition is an ordinance which, as a rite, symbolizes the death and burial to which, as an act, it hourly exposes them. Our Lord, with whom the baptismal rite was not yet instituted, finds the pledge and trait of discipleship in the "bearing of the cross" under whose shadow he perpetually walked. So the apostle, addressing those of whose Christian faith the universal symbol and pledge was baptism, no less naturally finds in that baptism their vow of discipleship, and of devotion to the deadly peril that awaited them. The believer's characteristic designation is that of one baptized for the dead. Why, then, if there be a resurrection, should he shrink from death? But why, if there be no resurrection, commit the folly of being baptized for it? It matters not, whether the fact of baptism as the profession of a faith which subjected them to persecution and death, or the form of the rite which symbolized at once the death and burial and resurrection, be primarily referred to. In any case, how foolish to submit to the symbolical burial which pointed. to a resurrection, but which brought on them the literal death without the resurrection which it prefigured!